The seductive fear that you’re using words wrong

It’s a dark night; you’re in an unfamiliar city, slightly lost, but pretty sure you’ll know where you are if you just get to the next corner. The streets are quiet. A stranger steps out of the gloom in front of you, and announces that certain words don’t mean what you think they mean. They’re words that you use but have never really felt comfortable with, words that you use mostly because you’ve heard them in set phrases, words like plethora.

Plethora, you wonder, could it be I’m using it wrong? That niggling uncertainty kicks in, the same niggling uncertainty that’s pushed you to educate yourself all these years. It creeps further, darkening your mind. Have I been using words wrong? Your breath quickens — how many others have thought heard me say them before this stranger came up and told me I was wrong? Have I used one of them lately? Have I been judged? Your pulse races. Did I just say one? — is, is that why this stranger materialized to announce it was wrong?

The stranger says more words are being used wrong, by others, by you. These words are more common, common enough to be known but not common enough to be well-known: myriad, enormity. Oh God, you think, I’ve used those words in business writing! The uncertainty changes into certainty, certainty that you are wrong, and worse, that people know it. Important people know it. That’s why you haven’t been promoted, it’s why your friends were laughing that one time and didn’t say why. The stranger has you now. The stranger knows the dark spots on your soul. The stranger is almost touching you now, so close, so close. Your eyes meet. The stranger’s eyes widen; this is it, the final revelation. Do you dare listen? You can’t listen, you must listen:

“And you’re using allow wrong, too!”

At which point the spell is broken — because c’mon, you’re not using allow wrong. You’d definitely have noticed that. You push the stranger out of the way, and realize your hotel’s just on the next block.

In the unfamiliar city of the Internet, I encountered such a stranger: Niamh Kinsella, writer of the listicle “14 words you’ve been using incorrectly this whole time“. Kinsella argues that your usage doesn’t fit with the true definition of these words, by which she usually means an early, obsolete, or technical meaning of the word.

Her first objection is to plethora, which she defines as “negative word meaning a glut of fluid”. And so it was in the 1500s, when it entered the language as a medical term. This medical meaning persists in the present day, but additional figurative meanings branched off of it long ago — so long ago, in fact, that one of the meanings branched off, flourished for 200 years, and still had enough time to fade into obsolescence by now. The extant figurative meaning, the one that most everyone means when they use plethora, is antedated to 1835 by the Oxford English Dictionary, at which point it was usually a bad thing (“suffering under a plethora of capital”, the OED quotes). But by 1882 we see the modern neutral usage: “a perfect plethora of white and twine-colored thick muslin”.

The second objection is to myriad, and here Kinsella deviates by ignoring the early usage. She hectors: “It’s an adjective meaning countless and infinite. As it’s an adjective, it’s actually incorrect to say myriad of.” But in fact myriadentered English as a noun, either as a transliteration of the Greek term for “ten thousand”, or as an extension of that very large number to mean “an unspecified very large number” (both forms are antedated by the OED to the same 1555 work). The adjectival form doesn’t actually appear until two centuries later, the 1700s. Both nominal and adjectival forms have been in use from their inception to the present day; claiming that one or the other is the only acceptable form is just silly.*

There’s no point in continuing this after the third objection, which is to using allow in cases that do not involve the explicit granting of permission. To give you an idea of what folly this is, think of replacements for allows in a supposedly objectionable sentence like “A functional smoke alarm allows me to sleep peacefully.” The first ones that come to my mind are lets, permits, gives me the ability, and enables. That’s the sign of a solid semantic shift; four of my top five phrasings of the sentence are all verbs of permission with the permission shifted to enablement. Kinsella herself has no beef with it when she isn’t aiming to object, judging by her lack of objection to an article headlined “Are we allowed optimism now?”.

This enablement usage isn’t new, either; the OED cites “His condition would not allow of his talking longer” from 1732. (Permit without permission is antedated even further back, to 1553.) This oughtn’t even to be up for debate; even if it were completely illogical — which, as an example of consistent semantic drift, it’s not — the fact that it is so standard in English means that it is, well, standard. It is part of English, and no amount of insisting that it oughtn’t to makes a difference. It’s similar to the occasional objection I see to Aren’t I?: even if I agreed it didn’t make sense, virtually every (non-Scottish/Irish) English speaker uses it in place of amn’t I?, so it’s right. End of discussion.

Why do we fall for this over and over again? Why do we let people tell us what language is and isn’t based on assertions that never have any references (Kinsella cites no dictionaries) and rarely hold up to cursory investigation? I don’t know, but my guess is that it appeals to that universal mixture of insecurity and vanity that churns inside each of us.

We are convinced that we must be doing everything wrong, or — and perhaps worse — that we’re doing most things right but there’s some unexpected subset of things that we have no idea we’re doing wrong. So if someone tells us we’re wrong, especially if they candy coat it by saying that it’s not our fault, that everyone’s wrong on this, well, we just assume that our insecurities were right — i.e, that we were wrong. But then, aware of this new secret knowledge, these 14 weird tricks of language use, our vanity kicks in. Now we get to be the ones to tell others they’re wrong. Knowing these shibboleths gives you the secret knowledge of the English Illuminati. Between our predisposition to believe we’re wrong, our desire to show others up by revealing they’re wrong, and our newfound membership in this elite brotherhood, what incentive do we have to find out that these rules are hogwash? All that comes out of skepticism is, well, this: me, sitting on my laptop, writing and rewriting while the sun creeps across a glorious sky on a beautiful day that I could have been spending on the patio of my favorite coffee shop, approaching my fellow patrons, dazzling them with my new conversation starter: “I bet you use plethora wrong. Allow me to explain.”

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*: In fact, Kinsella undermines her own definition of “countless and infinite” in her supposedly correct example by using “countless and infinite” to describe the finite set of stars in the universe, so maybe she’s just in love with the sound of her own hectoring.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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26 comments

I think that to some extent this is simply a byproduct of standardization. A standard language is a sort of cultural institution, and we feel the need to have gatekeepers who police it. But since Standard English is mostly self-sustaining, most of the policing that needs to be done is in eliminating optional variation, as James Milroy says, which often takes the form of learning invented rules and calling people out when they break them.

And regarding the incentive to debunk the rules, there really isn’t one, unless you find truth and facts to be their own incentive. You win the game by learning the rules and demonstrating that you know them. You don’t win anything by saying that the game is bunk and walking away.

Some years back, I saw a Hogarthian print (it must have been late 1700s) in a pub near where a lived, which had a very nice play on two old meanings of “plethora” – medical flushing, and glut of fluid – a picture of a fat, very red-faced clergyman drinking wine, with the caption “The plethora that may be forgiven to episcopal virtue”. I’ve never been able to track it down.

The neverending story of prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar. “You can’t say this, that structure is wrong, that word is misused, blah blah blah.” Of course there must be gatekeepers for the language, as Owen mentions above, but one thing is to keep an eye out so that people don’t go too crazy or become too careless and another very different one is to dictate that people must employ certain words only when they want to convey certain meanings. First of all, check a dictionary (seriously? Both “plethora” and “myriad”, for example, are supposed to mean what she emphatically states they don’t mean). Second of all, it is clear that nowadays it would not be accurate to use the term “ball” to refer to a car (OK, in this case we could probably say it would be wrong) but I bet that if everybody started to do so, if everybody started to say, “I have bought an incredibly fast ball,” in the end the language would accept it and we would have a new homonym. Why should we stick with the original meaning of “plethora”?

I am aware that my last example is an exaggeration, but come on, let’s stop putting so many restrictions on the evolution of language. There must be some control, with that I wholeheartedly agree, but just to a certain extent.

By the way, the self-acknowledged pedant has misspelled the phrase “muchos gracias.” As a Spanish who vows to the Real Academia Española I can confirm that it should be “muchas gracias.” No freedom over here in Spain to play with words or grammar structures, or at least not as much as you can do in English. Prescriptive grammar is the queen on this land.

I must say I’m very flattered you took the time to scrutinise my blog post. I’ll admit the point of it was to playfully invite argument and debate between the prescriptive and descriptive grammar camps.

My personal opinion on the subject of descriptive v prescriptive grammar (and pick apart v/vs/versus as you will, but it varies according to legal systems in different countries) is that the internet has sped up the evolution of language. I am well aware and happy in the knowledge that languages naturally change over time, but I do believe this makes it more important to respect the roots and literal meanings of words and encourage people to keep them in mind when expressing themselves.

The “well, it’s in the dictionary” argument is a tricky one. Descriptive grammar interpretation is very fashionable in the English language. These are also the same people who added “bootylicious” to the dictionary in 2003 and “selfie” this year (though I’ll admit I do like the latter).

I must disagree with you on the point you make about the existence of a finite number of stars in the universe. It’s widely agreed a) the universe is ever-expanding b) we can only use our estimation of its age and rate of expansion to calculate its limits c) stars continue to be born and die and are so huge in number that we cannot count them with the technology available to us.

Sara, thank you for pointing out my Spanish grammar mistake. I’m afraid I don’t speak a word of the language and I’ve corrected it in the original post.

So then when I do a performance review for my employee next week, should I call her buxom? She is very compliant and amiable, which is what buxom really means. (Look it up in the OED if you don’t believe me.) I just want to respect the root and literal meaning of the word in this ever-shifting internet age.

“My personal opinion on the subject of descriptive v prescriptive grammar […] is that the internet has sped up the evolution of language.”

And how, pray tell, did you come to that conclusion? All fourteen, supposedly wrong usages on your list predate the Internet by a very long time!

“…and pick apart v/vs/versus as you will…”

No, thank you. We are not the peevologists here!

“The “well, it’s in the dictionary” argument is a tricky one. Descriptive grammar interpretation is very fashionable in the English language. These are also the same people who added “bootylicious” to the dictionary in 2003 and “selfie” this year…”

And what is wrong with that, except that you personally don’t like it? Can you give me an objective reason why those words shouldn’t be in the dictionary?

“I must disagree with you on the point you make about the existence of a finite number of stars in the universe. It’s widely agreed a) the universe is ever-expanding b) we can only use our estimation of its age and rate of expansion to calculate its limits c) stars continue to be born and die and are so huge in number that we cannot count them with the technology available to us.”

What does any of that have to do with whether or not stars are infinite?

I’ve got to take issue with your sub-title. Prescriptivism should not die. The fundamental purpose of grammatical rules is to aid clarity. If prescriptivism were to die and schools were to simply decide that all written/spoken communication is valid, we would no longer have a common language. We would have thousands of languages, loosely based on English. You can argue that some individual cases are hair-splitting, but the movement as a whole can’t cease to exist if we want to be able to communicate with each other.

Daisybelle: In a word, no. Whether you go the descriptivist route or the prescriptivist route, Gabe’s title is correct.

If you want to go the prescriptivist route (boo!), then all you need to do is check in any dictionary and you will see that “wrong” is listed as both an adjective and an adverb (and a noun, though that’s not entirely relevant here).

If you want to go the descriptivist route, then a search of Google N-Grams will reveal that “doing it wrong” has always been more common than “doing it wrongly” except for time frames when neither appears in the corpus. Whether the use of “wrongly” is a dialectical difference or hypercorrection is hard to say based on the corpus, but even if it is a dialectical difference the use of “wrong” as an adverb is still correct and there is no need to change it.

Or at the very least, “wrong” is an adjective which should modify a noun. In your sentence it is modifying a verb. So the adverbial form “wrongly” should be used. But “incorrectly” is more appropriate.